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In a diplomatic negotiation, you always meet the same the other side all the time. Even if you should succeed in outsmarting him or in pressuring him, it only sets up a cycle in which he will try to get even.

Henry A. Kissinger

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Henry A. Kissinger
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More quotes by Henry A. Kissinger

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You become a superpower by being strong but also by being wise and by being farsighted. But no state is strong or wise enough to create a world order alone.
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It is not often that nations learn from the past even rarer that they draw the correct conclusions from it. For the lessons of historical experience, as of personal experience, are contingent. They teach the consequences of certain actions, but they cannot force a recognition of comparable situations.
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A leader who confines his role to his people's experience dooms himself to stagnation a leader who outstrips his people's experience runs the risk of not being understood.
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U.S. policy toward the third world should be one of depopulation
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I grew up in Germany during the Nazi period, and I came to this country when I was 15. And then I had to work in a factory because we had no resources. And I went to night school. So, it was not a rational ambition for me to become a world statesman.
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I do not criticize people who take a public stand on human rights issues. I express my respect for them. But some people are more influential without a public confrontation.
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Withdrawal of US troops will become like salted peanuts to the American public: The more US troops come home, the more will be demanded.
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A bluff taken seriously is more useful than a serious threat interpreted as a bluff.
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If peace is equated simply with the absence of war, it can become abject pacifism that turns the world over to the most ruthless.
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Leaders must invoke an alchemy of great vision.
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Any international system must have two key elements for it to work. One, it has to have a certain equilibrium of power that makes overthrowing the system difficult and costly. Secondly, it has to have a sense of legitimacy.
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Historically when there is a rising power like China, it has usually led to confrontations between the rising power and the existing dominant powers. And when you have a shift of the center of gravity of world affairs from the Atlantic to the Pacific, then you have an additional element.
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Left to its own devices, the State Department machinery tends toward inertia rather than creativity it is always on the verge of turning itself into an enormous cable machine.
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President Nixon in his inaugural address indicated that he wanted an era of negotiation. Our reasoning was that whatever our ideological differences, whatever our geopolitical differences, we were condemned to coexistence by nuclear weapons.
Henry A. Kissinger
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If eighty percent of your sales come from twenty percent of all of your items, just carry those twenty percent.
Henry A. Kissinger
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No one will ever win the battle of the sexes there's too much fraternizing with the enemy.
Henry A. Kissinger
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University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.
Henry A. Kissinger
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American politics are normally a result of pragmatic and not philosophical reasoning. No one in Washington has said we now prefer multilateralism.
Henry A. Kissinger
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If you control the food, you control a nation. If you control the energy, you control a region. If you control the money, you control the world.
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China has had a long and complex history and has managed to evolve its own culture for 4,000 years. It therefore not necessarily true that we know exactly what is best for the internal structure of China.
Henry A. Kissinger